‘A former member of ISIS has revealed the extent to which the cooperation of the Turkish military allows the terrorist group, who now control large parts of Iraq and Syria, to travel through Turkish territory to reinforce fighters battling Kurdish forces.’

“ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks,” said Omer of crossing the border into Turkey, “and they reassured us that nothing will happen, especially when that is how they regularly travel from Raqqa and Aleppo to the Kurdish areas further northeast of Syria because it was impossible to travel through Syria as YPG [National Army of Syrian Kurdistan] controlled most parts of the Kurdish region.”

100 years after Gallipoli our plucky chaps are about to re-engage ….Turkey? …….. do you think John knows Turkish Army are supporting ISIL ?

“This is not exactly news but Western media is still desperately trying to convince the public that all the reports about U.S./NATO operations using jihadist mercenaries in Russia’s North Caucasus and Central Asia are just “conspiracy theories.” Therefore, the editorial board of the Washington Post lost no time in portraying the Russian President as a lying conspiracy theorist. And if one were to believe Western media, the same is true of Putin’s most important ally in the North Caucasus, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who recently urged ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “to take off his mask” and admit that he is a CIA agent. Kadyrov announced last week that his men are searching for al-Baghdadi but that they cannot find him because he is working for the CIA. The comments were the latest in a war of words between Kadyrov and ISIS, which has prompted influential ISIS leader Omar al-Shishani aka Tarkhan Batirashvili to put a $5 million bounty on Kadyrov’s head. Interestingly enough, Batirashvili’s curious background raises the question of whether he is working for an intelligence agency as well and as more details emerge, it becomes clear that Batirashvili is not your average jihadist:

Like so many of the world’s most brutal dictators, military leaders, tyrants, and jihadists, it appears Tarkhan was trained by the very best: the United States government. According to his father and former colleagues, Tarkhan worked for an elite “Spetsnaz” Georgian military-intelligence unit—at least until he caught tuberculosis, lost his job in the intelligence unit, was then framed by that same intelligence unit, and went to jail in 2010 for weapons possession.

Tarkhan’s father claims that his son worked, specifically, for the ministry of interior’s KUD or “Kudi,” basically the domestic-intelligence and special-operations service in Georgia, officially called the Constitutional Security Department. The agency was notoriously brutal. When asked if it was true that his son Tarkhan was trained by the United States, Temur says, “Of course they did. They trained all of the Georgian army back then… My boy was just 19 when he went to the army… This KUDI, where he was working, it was an intelligence and reconnaissance unit.”

Batirashvili has been described as the “tactical mastermind behind Islamic State’s swift military gains on the ground in Iraq’s Anbar province” and he is credited with many battlefield successes but according to the above-mentioned article in TheDaily Beast, Tarkhan Batirashvili “may well be a figurehead for his older brother” Tamaz who is supposed to be “the real mastermind behind the Chechen operatives running ISIS offensives in Syria and Iraq.” At any rate, the two brothers have long-standing ties with Georgian intelligence and the article even mentions that “Georgia’s Anti-Terrorism Center, or ATC, allegedly ran some jihadists out of Pankisi to fight against Moscow’s troops in Grozny.”